Search This Blog

30 Days Wild│Part 4

After 19 days #30DaysWild feels like it came to a grinding halt - illness, birthdays, parties...life! We did plenty of outdoors stuff for the last days of the month, but I didn’t jot anything down as we went along so I can’t remember what we did when. I guess it doesn’t matter though, and the record keeping really wasn’t what this project was about for me and the children. For us, it was about making more of our time outdoors (we already spent a lot of time outside anyway) and learning a few things along the way. With that in mind, I’ve just collated a selection of the things we’ve been up to and popped them al together in this post.

1) My daughter told me she’d done a mini-beast hunt in the nursery garden and wanted to give it a try at home. She got out her explorer kit (magnifying glass, binoculars, torch, bug viewer) and showed her little brother how it was done.

2) One weekend we had a day out at Cutteslowe Park It’s a lovely park with a couple of good play areas, a splash pad, a duck pond, minature railway (check opening as it doesn’t run every day), sand pit, and a greenhouse the area with lots of butterflies, terrapins and insects. Whilst walking around the park we spotted this huge bug hotel and we spent a bit of time having a good nosey in there.

3) “Painting” in the garden. One of my son’s favourite activities is “painting” the garden fence and garage wall. I give him a bucket of water, and some paint brushes and off he goes.

4) Much to my husbands delight, my daughter and I have started making an eco-brick If you don’t know what an eco-brick is, a quick Google search will give you loads of information, but it’s basically a plastic bottle, crammed full of non-biodegradable rubbish, high can then be used to build something. This has resulted in a lot of rubbish and wrappers hanging around on our draining board waiting to dry, but it’s oddly satisfying.

5) After a lot of love and attention this month, the garden is doing really well. Our pumpkin plants are huge (fingers crossed for some fruit), the sunflowers are doing well despite the slugs best efforts, I managed to bring my rather sad looking hydrangea back to life, my fuchsias are very colourful, the clematis has flowered, and my daughter’s wildflower garden is crammed full of things ready to bloom.

Over the weekend my dad also spotted that the begonia bulbs I planted in the front garden have started to make an appearance too. My hanging basket isn’t looking too bad either.

***

How did your #30DaysWild go? Did you do better than me and managed to blog for the whole 30 days? If so, drop your links in the comments below, I’d love to give them a read.

Your new found “wildness”doesn’t have to stop now June is over. The Wildlife Trusts are encouraging people to #StayWild throughout the year. We have ordered some caterpillars to arrive in the middle of this month so we are most definitely going to continue enjoying the great outdoors.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

A few days ago we returned from our first ever trip to Disneyland Paris. I have started writing about our holiday a few times since we returned but found that all the logistical, organisational type information was getting lost amongst telling you what a lovely time we had. Therefore, I'm going to run the risk of boring you stupid and split this into more than one post. Alrighty then, let's do the fun "trip report" first (you can find details of what and how we booked here.)

I had told the kids we were going to Disneyland beforehand, no elaborate "reveal" here, but I'd wanted to prepare them. I actually wasn't sure how they would react to the characters and costumes so showed them a few photos and videos I'd found online so they could see what the characters look like, and that there was no need to be afraid of them. I think this really paid off as they were so confident at the "meet and greets" we did.

Throughout my life I've had many different people comment on how organised I am. This, however, is an illusion and certainly doesn't extend to my housekeeping! If something's not written down, it doesn't get done. I do love a list though, and stationery, so that works pretty well for me. I've always had a planner of some form or another, and a million and one notebooks lying around with various lists in. I have found coordinating the diaries and lists of four people and a cat (he has a surprising number of commitments!) quite tricky so have recently jumped onto the bullet journal band wagon. Who knew that there was such a huge online community focused on what is essentially a neat system to keep all your appointments and lists in one place?!

It does appear that I'm not the only one in the house who likes to know what we're doing though. About 6 months ago I was getting really fed up of trying to explain what was happening when to Charlotte. She was continu…

If you follow me on Instagram you will know that last month we raised some butterflies. I posted a few pictures and a LOT of stories over there whilst the little project was on-going but I thought it'd be nice to create a blog post about it with some more details. WARNING: this is going to be a pretty long post with quite a lot of photos - so grab a cuppa and a Hobnob or two! Stu came home from work towards the end of last year saying a colleague had been talking about some butterflies his children raised over the summer. Stu thought it sounded good and wanted to look at doing it with our two. A bit of research on the Insect Lore website told us you could only buy caterpillars between March and September so we decided it'd be something we'd do around their birthdays this year.

Our caterpillars arrived through the post on 3rd July. They came via Royal Mail and were literally handed over in a post bag by the Post Woman. I hadn't realised what I had been handed so promptl…